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Though her career spanned four decades, the American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1966) is mostly known for the work she made during her four-year stint at the Farm Security Administration, the progressive New Deal agency founded to combat rural poverty. It was the mid-thirties, and the combined effects of soil erosion and economic recession were driving thousands of Midwestern farmers to California each month. They came seeking work and arable land, and wasted away in makeshift camps. Lange’s job was to document this crisis and bolster establishment support for the camps. And boy, did she succeed: Migrant Mother (1936), her iconic photograph of grit and despair, became the face of the Dust Bowl itself. The image packs such an emotional punch, the day it was published the government promised two thousand food rations to the mother’s pea-pickers camp.
Migrant Mother made Lange’s career, but it also overshadowed her other accomplishments. This is something Lange knew, and actively worked against: in 1965, she suggested leaving the image out of her upcoming MoMA retrospective. (The curator urged her to reconsider). And so it seems safe to say Lange would approve of the new photobook Day Sleeper, which draws upon her extensive archive at the Oakland Museum of Art – and leaves Migrant Mother out. Edited by the American photographer Sam Contis, the book brings together previously unpublished images Lange made in California between the 30s and 60s. It melds her photojournalism with portraits she took of San Francisco’s elite, before the Great Depression hit, as well as private images of her husband and sons, and the tender moments they shared.
This isn’t something you know, flipping through the book. Contis loosened Lange’s images from their historical context, imbuing them with a universal feel, emphasizing their aesthetics. She did this by separating the images from the lengthy captions Lange was so fond of. “Every photograph”, Lange once wrote, “can be fortified by words”. She crafted captions using field notes, interviews, folk songs and data, striving to describe the socio-economic conditions from which crises emerged. I linger on Lange’s caption use because their absence in Day Sleeper completely changes the feel of her work. Silent now, the images are relieved of their informative purpose, and reveal a Lange we are unused to, a Lange not of photojournalism, documentation, and gravitas, but one more sensuous, revelling in the pleasures of textures and light.
The whites of Lange’s black-and-white images are luminous, alternatively sharp, blinding, and comforting, like the sun’s very own rays. In some images this light coats the entire scene, bleaching everything, hanging heavy, while in others it imbues a lighter, sun-dappled ease. And even when the sun isn’t so obvious, burning shoulders, caressing cheeks, it’s still there in other ways. It organises the day, deciding who does what when, as no one picks peas in the dead of night. And it helps grow the plants that dot the background of Lange’s images, plants that are, if anything else (besides back-breaking work to harvest), pleasant to eat, touch, and smell.
Moving through the book, the feeling is of people going about their day. They struggle with work and they struggle to find work, these struggles punctuated, nonetheless, with palpable moments of joy, like walking by the just-blossomed flowers of a cherry tree. Which isn’t to say the photographs in Day Sleeper are completely divorced from the socio-political events of their time. The effects of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression are still visible in the book, but they’re no longer front and centre, underlined by captions. They’ve become more of a backdrop: you sense them in the image of people gathering, looking distressed, or of a family, covered in dust, chatting below a flimsy-looking tent.
A recurrent figure lies at the centre of the book: the day sleeper. The day sleeper sleeps during the hours when the sun is out, and the book presents a selection of who this figure might be: a child, a pregnant woman, a farmhand, a city man. People who work hard, and people who don’t work at all, sleeping whenever they want. It’s a figure of dreams and interiority, far removed from the reach of field notes and economic data. Moreover – and this is my favourite part – sleeping during the day throws a wrench, so to speak, in cycles of production and consumption, cycles that Lange, as a photojournalist of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, was particularly concerned with. And if your body has historically been a product for consumption or a tool for production, then sleeping during the sunlit hours, those sacred productive hours, is taking ownership of one’s time, at least momentarily, for one blissful afternoon snooze.
And so, while the Lange photographs I’ve seen in the past seemed so clearly anchored in the stiff fabric of reality, there are sequences in Day Sleeper that feel like a fever dream, floating by. The feeling is especially salient when images echo each other across the pages, like the round belly of Lange’s pregnant stepdaughter, as round as the buoyant party balloons in the previous page (ready to pop). Or like the bed sheets hanging high on a clothesline between two buildings, now suddenly (magically) draped over the shoulders of a solitary figure standing in a field of unidentifiable greens, waiting, I imagine, for the crops to finish synthesizing the sun’s rays, so they will grow, and become harvestable.
– Reviewed by Edmée Lepercq
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Day Sleeper, by Dorothea Lange – Sam Contis, was published by Mack.
